What Paul Ryan's primary could tell us about Donald Trump and the GOP

An early-May poll showed Paul Ryan's primary challenger with the
support of 14% of voters in Wisconsin's 1st District.

Earlier this week, Paul Nehlen, the Wisconsin businessman looking
to unseat the House speaker, wound up with a near identical level
of support — just 15.9% — in the Tuesday primary.

Those numbers could prove telling in not only how Donald Trump
will perform in November, but how Trumpism could translate
without Trump at its helm.

In the run up to his primary, Nehlen received the backing of many
of Trump's most prominent supporters — such as conservative
author Ann Coulter and former Republican vice presidential
nominee Sarah Palin — while some of the more "alt-right" media
outlets providing Trump with outlandishly favorable coverage
(Breitbart, Drudge Report) used similar language to describe
Nehlen as they did the Manhattan billionaire. Fox News host Sean
Hannity toyed with providing an endorsement to Nehlen. In each
case, polls showing unfavorable results for the candidate of
their backing — polls that in Nehlen's case proved almost
entirely accurate — were ignored.

"Ryan's political career is over but for a miracle because
he has so disrespected the will of the people," Palin said on CNN
in May while Ryan was still debating whether he should endorse
Trump.

"This man is a hard-working guy, so in touch with the people,"
Palin later said of Nehlen. "Paul Ryan and his ilk ... They feel
so threatened at this point that their power, their prestige,
their purse will be adversely affected by the change that is
coming with Trump and with someone like Paul Nehlen, that they're
not thinking straight right now."

Warning that there's a "natural risk" of associating the results
of a House district and try to use it to tell a story about the
broader electorate, Matt Mackowiak, a GOP strategist and founder
of the Potomac Strategy Group, told Business Insider that many on
the farther side of the right wing "damaged their credibility" on
Trump with their assertions in the Ryan/Nehlen race.

"I think the commonality is that there is that there's a small
circle of, I even hate to hesitate to use the word conservative
because I don't think it's appropriate, but there's a small
circle of Trump-boosters in the conservative media that are just
true believers," Mackowiak said. "They won't even consider any
evidence or any arguments to the contrary. And so they had an
immense amount of over-confidence in the Ryan congressional
race."

Ryan is an unusual member of the House in that he's both in an
extremely high-profile position and that he still makes trips
back to his district every weekend, Mackowiak added, saying that
he's a good congressman in addition to being House speaker.

"In a way, their overconfidence really met its demise in probably
the single worst congressional district for them to run an
outside challenger in," he said. "I think you can make an
argument that they have damaged their own credibility with the
over-the-top statements they used in trying ot make that race
appear competitive. It does make you wonder if they're
overstating the race in that case, if they're also not
overstating the case in the presidential race."

The draw of Nehlen to the high-profile Trump backers was that the
Wisconsin businessman's platform was nearly identical to Trump's,
with immigration and trade being the top two priorities. Trump
himself would tip his hat to Nehlen earlier this month while
withholding an endorsement of Ryan that would come days later.

"If you look at the closed circle of Trump-boosters, high-profile
Trump boosters — Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter,
Drudge, Breitbart obviously — you could take the same language
they used about Trump and they applied it to Nehlen, and that
applies to both ideological and policy and their own sort of
political analysis of the race," Mackowiak said. "To me, their
overstatements in the Nehlen race should be a flashing yellow to
anyone who wants to listen to their analysis or their predictions
about Trump's political strength right now."

Tim Miller, who formerly worked as communications director for
Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign, told Business Insider that
the election as a whole has served as a "wake-up call" to many in
the media that "their influence isn't as great as they think."

"You know on the one hand, Nehlen had all this support from the
alt-right conservative media to no effect," he said. "On the flip
side, the big name mainstream Republican conservative media types
were all against Trump in the primary to no effect."

"I hope that the Nehlen blowout and the impending Trump blowout
will be a wake-up call to the Trump cheerleaders in the media,
but I'm not too optimistic," he continued.

Paul
Nehlen.AP Photo/Scott
Bauer

The other question the Ryan/Nehlen race bring about is whether
Trump's platform — which was Nehlen's platform — can be
successful without Trump at the helm.

As the polling showed, even the support of Trump's most fervent
backers could barely move the needle with Nehlen while the
bombastic Trump was able to capture a nationwide nomination with
support from similar corners.

"Oh there's no question," Mackowiak said of whether Trumpism
needs Trump to be successful as a platform. "Trump's campaign has
been all about himself, all about his larger than life
personality, his own brand, his own celebrity."

Trump had advantages that "no other outside candidate could
have," he continued.

"I do think there's some resonance on immigration and trade and
perhaps on non-interventionism with a portion of the electorate,"
he continued. "I just think there's a high-floor and a
low-ceiling. [Trump] always falls between 35% and 42% of the
electorate. Nehlen doesn't have Trump's name identification, his
celebrity, his ability to dominate the media. That was much more
of a traditional outsider challenger that the uphill battle that
taking on the incumbent would always require."

Miller noted that Wisconsin as a whole voted for Sen. Ted Cruz of
Texas — and not Trump — in the primary, a sign that the state
could be uniquely inhospitable to the alt-right populist
movement.

Donald
Trump.Thomson
Reuters

What he dubbed as "mini-Trump's" are sure to run for offices
across the country, but Miller thinks they will only be able to
find success in certain areas.

"I think the Trump message is not one that works in states where
there's high degrees of family cohesion and church attendance,"
he said. "It doesn't really work in the suburbs. So in some
places around the country, I think that's going to be a failure.
In other places, I think you're going to see some mini-Trumps
that have success."

He called the assertion that Trumpism can only be successful with
Trump "a lot of wishful thinking" that "hasn't really been
tested," but added that to win on the Trump platform in a Hose or
Senate race is particularly hard if you don't have the "oversized
personality of Trump."

Where it might be easier to repeat, and what he fears, is on the
presidential level.

"We've been fooled once by Trump," he said. "And I don't want to
be fooled again looking at 2020 thinking this was sort of this
one-time black swan."